1. Field of Invention
This invention relates to a proximity triggered job scheduling system and method that schedule and execute a proximity triggered job when approach another wireless communication device, such as a wireless base station and a wireless mobile communication device.
2. Description of Prior Art
Many personal digital assistant (PDA) are design to target the mobile user market, such as Palm and Microsoft Pocket PC. These personal digital assistants provide many daily use applications for mobile users, such as schedule, reminder, to-do list warning applications. These applications are sensitive to the time instead of location. For example, the schedule application will notice user when time is close to the scheduled time of an appointment.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,177,905 described a location-triggered reminder for mobile user. The absolute location triggered reminder use a Global Position System (GPS) to position the user's geographic location. Then, user request a remind message when enter a region defined by user's current position and range information given by user. This system requires a positioning system, for example GPS, to be used with the personal digital assistant that will increase the manufacturing cost and battery power consumption. Almost all of these positioning system have limited usage or useless in indoors or tall building shaded down town area.
Some proximity awareness applications use a short-range wireless transmitter to broadcast the identification code. Hummingbird is a mobile device that aims to support awareness between group members who are in the physical vicinity of each other. A Hummingbird needs to periodically broadcast an identification code that is recognized by its group member and scans surrounding for other Hummingbirds of its group member. It tells its user when another group member has been detected. Hummingbird doesn't provide the capability for user to schedule proximity-triggered task. Hummingbird used a proprietary RF transmitter and not does not offer or utilize computer-networking capability, which need to implement at least a data link layer protocol stack to maintain a reliable connection. Therefore, it more like sensor system instead of networking system. The periodic identification broadcasting requirement increase the network traffic and also increase the power consumption in all Hummingbirds in vicinity.
In another category of applications, the awareness relies on network protocol layer such as the network layer, the transport layer, or higher layer defined in Open Systems Interconnection Reference model. The Proem system by Oregon University is a collaborative peer-to-peer application for mobile ad hoc networks. The system defines a transport protocol that is implemented on top of a variety of existing protocol such as TCP/P, UDP, or HTTP. Peer of the system can discover other peers by periodically broadcast request and other peer responses to it. Peer can also periodically announce their presence by broadcasting the name, a Uniform Resource Identifier, of the peer. Proem system need to be installed on every peers to be able to discovery each other. Proem application aware of presence of other user and be able to define rule of encounter such as alerting the user. The awareness capability in this category builds on higher level of communication protocol layer that requires the connection between peers to be established first. However, establishing the connection usually need an authentication process which introduce the inconvenience. Data transmitted after connection usually have encryption. If skip authentication or encryption, it will create the security problem. Relying on high-level communication will cause large amount of data communication, which increase traffic through the wireless network and also increase the power consumption in all mobile devices.
None of the prior art utilizes the media access control (MAC) address or service set identifier in MAC layer frame to detect other nearby wireless communication device and trigger user scheduled tasks, such as reminder, TODO-List, e-mail retrieval, computer system or network login, control other appliances, etc.
Since wireless communication technology becomes mature, many notebook computer, PDA, or mobile communication device are installed with a wireless communication interface module, such as IEEE 802.11 wireless local area network interface or Bluetooth wireless interface module, GSM modem module, etc. Through the wireless connection, mobile user could access information on another computer system or another PDA in the local network area or even the whole Internet for reading email, transferring files, executing a job, or access services. In the future, mobile computing devices will all have the wireless communication capability.